Most city strategies are well intentioned. They speak to outcomes almost everyone would agree with: liveability, sustainability, connectivity, prosperity.

The problem is that none of these are choices.

A strategy only becomes real when the opposite was a plausible path. Until something is consciously foregone, what looks like strategy is often just a description of things we hope will be true.

This is where much of urban strategy falls short. Plans expand to accommodate competing interests, trade-offs are softened or obscured, and what remains is difficult to disagree with but equally difficult to act on. When pressure builds, there is little to defend. Systems default to what is easiest to protect: cost, schedule, and incremental progress.

Good business strategy offers a useful discipline here. It accepts that positioning requires choice. It concentrates effort in some areas and not others. And critically, it treats those choices as commitments to be held over time.

Cities operate under different constraints. They must serve broad civic needs and cannot simply opt out of responsibilities. But within those constraints, the same principle applies. Without clear choices about where to concentrate effort and what to forego, advantage fails to form.

If cities are serious about shaping their future, the task is not to produce more comprehensive plans. It is to build the capacity to make and hold a small number of consequential choices.

That is where strategy begins.

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This reflection builds on a conversation on the Challenger Cities podcast between Heath Gledhill, Tom Shield and Iain Montgomery:
https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep76-urban-troubleshooting